Under the unusual stress of the past week's brutal weather, the MBTA's equipment did exactly as expected: it completely failed.
Thank the state legislature.
Details will be sorted out over time, but initial reports suggest more than a third of Red Line and Orange Line trains disabled; iced-over stretches of third rails; broken down buses; and a variety of switch, signal, cable, substation, and HVAC problems. MBTA General Manager Beverly Scott has already indicated that it will take several days for service to return to normal.
Well, duh. As one Twitter user noted, about a third of Red Line trains in the fleet during the 2015 blizzard had also been through the 1978 blizzard. The “useful life” of those trains, as officially defined, expired 20 years ago. Every Orange Line train in the fleet is past its useful life date. Hundreds of buses have reached or are about to reach their useful life dates.
The vehicles are only the most obvious, and well-documented, problems. The decades-old mechanical infrastructure is so poorly looked after, officials reviewing a 2009 fire essentially conceded that they weren't even aware of a wiring problem requiring a $200 million system-wide repair.
You can cast a lot of blame in a lot of directions for the sad state of affairs, but the big culprit is pretty clear: state legislators, particularly those from outside Boston, who have spent the past 20 years whistling past the disaster.
They have known, for many, many years, that the state needs to spend a bunch of money on maintenance and upgrading of the MBTA. They don't care.
Sure, there are other financial strains on the authority. Saddling it with old debt service was ridiculous. The Carmen's Union and other labor contracts have placed additional burdens. Voters just shot down an automatic source of funding. Redundancies and inefficiencies have been rampant, although significantly reduced since a major Department of Transportation restructuring early in the Patrick administration.
Howl at those issues if you wish, as many of us have for years. And, certainly, debate the need for spending on other transportation needs, including the new projects and expansions that tend to get more favorable treatment from lawmakers.
But those discussions, and those dollars, are all separate from the warnings that endlessly emanate from study after study – not to mention grouchy Twitter users on a daily basis.
Maintenance and upkeep is a basic, essential part of having a public transportation system. I mean, I assume that for these new projects, we wouldn't determine a need, spend billions meeting it, and then refuse to spend the millions required to keep it from all falling apart. Right?
And, for all the potential value of those other projects, none of them – by a very wide margin – are as vital to the good of the Commonwealth as the need to efficiently get people to and from jobs, leisure, and other activities in Boston.
And yet, the state legislature refused for years to spend $3 million to build platforms to put Green Line trains on, so engineers could do repairs. They quite literally asked the MBTA to prioritize which threats to public safety it would repair each year.
The Globe reported a few years ago that those old Orange Line trains were all in danger of wheel bearing failures, which could derail those vehicles – and apparently the only early-warning system is for the crew to notice a strange odor.
After the 2009 disaster I mentioned above, the state dawdled on fixing those wiring-system problems until another fire, nine months later, prompted the MBTA to fast-track the project. As Brian Kane of the MBTA Advisory Board was quoted at the time: “basic infrastructure catching on fire should be within their control.” But wasn't.
Some help is on the way, thanks to an $800 million funding bill and a $13 billion bond bill passed in the 2013-'14 legislative session. But that was hacked down from Governor Deval Patrick pushing for a huge transportation infrastructure investment. The legislature hacked it down (eventually passing), in no small part because they were pissy about the way Patrick unveiled the proposal without briefing them.
More importantly, lawmakers outside the city remain stubbornly opposed to spending that they see as money vacuumed from their constituents toward Boston. Patrick, attempting to play to that sentiment, overloaded his proposal with initiatives all over the state. And still I had more than one lawmaker tell me directly that they were in opposition until their own district's project got added to the menu.
Now we have a cost-cutting new Governor, Charlie Baker, who is no more likely to invest in MBTA upkeep now than he was with the Bill Weld and Paul Cellucci administrations. At least this week's fiasco might prevent him from trying to stop the transportation bonds, as he is doing with the one for convention center expansion.
Nor can we expect House Speaker Robert DeLeo to ask his members from outside of Boston to come around on the issue. And I somehow doubt that new Senate President Stan Rosenberg will be touting it on his upcoming “Commonwealth Conversation” events in western and central Massachusetts.
In other words, don't expect anything to change. We'll be experiencing MBTA malfunctions for many years to come.
David Bernstein is a political writer residing in Virginia. He's also 1/3 of The Scrum podcast .
